Last Night's Dream: Of Death, Love, and Remembrance

I am walking outdoors, talking with Bill Gibson. Bill sees something on the ground, bends over to pick it up. It is the wrapper from a stick of gum that has been folded very small and tossed into the gutter. Time and the elements have polished it into a jewel-like state. Bill talks about his dead friend Lenny. Lenny would fold up chewing-gum wrappers like this and toss them away all the time, knowing that some of them would eventually become jewels like this. He would also throw soda and beer bottles into the sea, so that they would eventually be made into driftglass. Now, Bill said, Lenny is dead, but every so often Bill would find something beautiful that reminded him of Lenny. It is incumbent on us all, Bill told me, to do what Lenny did, so that, after we die, the people who loved us will be occasionally reminded of us, so that we can still be present in a way for them.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii)

The Devil Can Cite Scripture for His Purpose

I overlooked it when Avedon Carol linked to it, but Roz Kaveney noticed and remarked upon Avedon's link to an entry on Faithful Progressive about the degree to which the alleged fundamentalists in the Christian Right movement in the US cherry-pick the Bible to suit their preconceived agendas, rather than taking the Bible as a whole as their guide.

Faithful Progressive quotes in turn an essay by University of Chicago Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Margaret M. Mitchell, entitled How Biblical is the Christian Right? Mitchell examined biblical quotes on a number of prominent Web sites of well-known figures of the Christian Right. Mitchell's answer to the question "How Biblical is the Christian Right," it turns out, is "not very."

Here's Mitchell's money quote:

The Christian Right represents biblical interpretation in a conjunction of two selective circles: of what are the key issues in the political realm and what are the central passages in the biblical record. It represents an odd alignment of each. The canonical delineation is striking—a focus on the Old Testament, with special prominence given to Judges and 1 and 2 Chronicles, as well as to Genesis and Leviticus; and in the New Testament, to selected moralizing passages of the Pauline letters and Revelation. It is easy to see then what is missing: the prophets of Israel and the teachings of Jesus (the Gospels). Along with them go concern with social/political issues such as economic inequality, peace-making, love and forgiveness, and critique of religious hypocrisy (just to choose a few!).

In other words, the prominent advocates of the adoption of the Christian Bible as the foundation of American political and moral values willfully ignore the bulk of the teachings of that same Christian Bible.

If I were a Christian, I would take a mighty dim view indeed of the leaders of the Christian Right promoting and publicizing such a thoroughly distorted version of Christianity, built on a foundation of intolerance, hate, and cruelty. It's no wonder that so many decent people cringe when they hear the word "Christian." If these leaders actually wanted compassionate people to reject Christianity, they could hardly do a better job.

Real Live Poker-Playing Preacher

In Tomball, Texas, a suburb of Houston, reports SF Gate, a Baptist minister named Ken Shuman has an unusual ministry. Quoth David Ian Miller in SF Gate:

[Shuman is] now the general manager of Main Street Crossing, a popular coffee shop and live-music venue in Tomball, Texas, that has become a kind of Christian community center. By day, it's just a coffee house. But on nights and weekends several ministries, including Shuman's Wellspring Church, hold their worship services there. They also run a host of activities, including discussion groups and poker games three nights a week.

"The idea is mostly to provide a fun place to hang out," Shuman says. "We don't do heavy evangelism." Still, he adds, it's often easier to connect with the faithful over a round of Texas hold 'em than from behind a conventional pulpit.

Shuman was an ordinary Baptist preacher who led an ordinarily successful congregation when he had a crisis of faith. He left his church and eventually found a place at Main Street Crossing, a coffee house that serves beer and wine, with live performance space that is available both for music group bookings and Christian fellowship meetings.

I've heard that you tell people that despite being a pastor, you will "whup their ass" at poker. Is that true?

(Laughs) I don't know where you got that quote from, but the thing is, well, I told you I was a success junkie. So whatever I do, I want to do it well. And so I decided after the first night of poker that I had to learn how to play simply because there were people there, and I'm trying to connect with people, and what better way than to sit down at a table for three hours with a group of people and play cards?

So I started reading books and learned how to play poker at a pretty good level. And actually, as of last week, I am the point leader for the league that plays at our place.

And how do your new visitors respond to an ass-whupping, poker-playing pastor?

You know, most typical church people look at me like: "You left this nice big church to come do this? And now you're drinking beer and playing poker? You've lost the faith." And I just have to live with all that. I'm not worried about impressing the church people. What I'm worried about, or what I'm most concerned with, is just connecting with these people that play poker.

And I feel like I pastor all of them. I know about when they are going in the hospital, I know about the surgeries they have, I know about their marital problems, because they have begun to see me as a pastor that they can trust.

I think the biggest issue out there today for a lot of folks is they just don't think there is anybody they can trust with their stuff. They think he's gonna preach to me, or just tell me to come to church or pray a little harder and everything will be fixed. I believe we're all broken people. We're just broken in different places, and we all have addictions, and that we just need to come clean with all that and say: "Life is a journey, and faith is a journey. Wherever you are in that journey, let's journey together, and maybe we can help each other as we go."

My understanding is that gambling isn't approved of by Southern Baptists. Do your poker games include gambling?

No. They don't. It's just a league. The players don't pay to play. And there can be no exchanging of money at any of our sessions. If we did, we would lose our license – our beer and wine license – and feasibly they could shut us down, and feasibly they could haul me to jail.

The Link That Can Be Followed ...

Ed Felten, of all people, points us to Das Tao Te King von Lao Tse, a compendium of dozens upon dozens of renditions and translations of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, in many languages, including Chinese, German, English, Russian, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, French, and Icelandic, among others. The Chinese includes both the classical and the Mawang Dui texts. The English translations include those of Feng & English, Robert G. Henricks, and D. C. Lau, among others – even one by Aleister Crowley! Not included, alas, is Ursula Le Guin's wonderful rendition, but you can't have everything.

The site's niftiest feature is its capability to compare texts side-by-side, with pages for comparing two at a time and four at a time, which comes close to providing the experience Le Guin had of reading the 1898 translation by Paul Carus, owned by her father, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:

[Carus] printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.

To have the text thus made accessible was not only to have a Rosetta Stone for the book itself, but also to have a touchstone for comparing other English translations one with another. If I could focus on which word the translators were interpreting, I could begin to understand why they made the choice they did. I could compare various interpretations and see why they varied so tremendously; could see how much explanation, sometimes how much bias, was included in the translation; could discover for myself that several English meanings might lead me back to the same Chinese word. And, finally, for all my ignorance of the language, I could gain an intuition of the style, the gait and cadence, of the original, necessary to my ear and conscience if I was to try to reproduce it in English. [Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1997, Shambhala Publications, Boston; p. 107]

It's easy to compare the classical text, rendered in pinyin, to a translation, and find in the original rhythm and symmetry that is lost in translation. Here's the opening in pinyin:

dao ke dao, fei chang dao; ming ke ming, fei chang ming....

Here's the Feng & English version of the opening:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name....

I think this is beautiful, even though I don't know any Chinese language to any degree beyond being able to say "aiyah" at the poker table.

Who Will Be the Next Pope?

Place your bets, everyone! Bestbetting.com has the line on who will be chosen as the next Pope.

There are a limited selection of choices, ranging from Dionigi Tettamanzi, currently at 3.6:1 against, to the 99:1 longshot of the Australian George Pell.

Lynn Kendall tells me via AIM that she's disappointed there are no odds listed for the selection of Cardinal Sin. The bookmakers cannily don't provide the odds for the field.

(via Majikthise)

This Age Wanted Heroes

Shut up. Listen. There is something calling, Paulinka. If you still retain a shred of decency you can hear it – it's a dim terrible voice that's calling – a bass howl, like a cow in a slaughterhouse, but far, far off... It is calling us to action, calling us to stand against the calamity, to spare nothing, not our blood, nor our happiness, nor our lives in the struggle to stop the dreadful day that's burning now in oil flames on the horizon. What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle, but unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient. The best of us, lacking. The most decent, not decent enough. The kindest, too cruel, the most loving too full of hate, the wisest, too stupid, the fittest unfit to take up the burden of the times. The Enemy has a voice like seven thunders. What chance did that dim voice ever have? Marvel that anyone heard it instead of wondering why nobody did anything, marvel that we heard it, we who have no right to hear it – NO RIGHT! And it would be a mercy not to. But mercy ... is a thing ... no one remembers its face anymore. The best would be that time would stop right now, in this middling moment of awfulness, before the very worst arrives. We'd all be spared more than telling. That would be best.

(Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day)

Communication Breakdown – Communication Breakthrough: Being Whole in the Heat (A Six-Week Class Starting 9/15/04)

(Another Wednesday evening class in process work from Lane Arye, who is now my advisor in the graduate school program I'm starting next week)

Communication Breakdown – Communication Breakthrough:
Being Whole in the Heat

A Six Week Series of Classes in Worldwork and Process Work

with Lane Arye, Ph.D. 

Skillful communication can be very helpful in conflict situations. What happens, though, when communication breaks down, either because we have never learned skillful communication, because the “correct” way does not go along with our cultural or personal style, because we are feeling too much emotion, or because we are too deep in the conflict to remember what we know? Then it can be useful to trust the process, to follow the wisdom of our bodies, to let our double messages and “wrong” communication lead the way. 

In this series of classes, we will learn and practice communication tools that can help us to be more effective and compassionate, to get our point across and really listen. We will also learn to follow ourselves when we are in the heat. Through group process, individual work, theory, discussion, and practical exercises, we will learn to be more fluid, authentic, playful, and free with friends, enemies, lovers, and co-workers.

TIME: 7pm to 10pm

DATES: Wednesdays September 15, 22, 29, October 6, 13, 27

COST: $20 per class (Need-based fees considered)

CONTACT: Lane (510) 558-8805

WHERE: 1452 Cornell Avenue. Berkeley (Please park in lot across street)

All are welcome to the first class.  Commitment required after first class.

PROCESS WORK and WORLDWORK offer powerful and effective tools that can help us to work toward wholeness, well-being, social justice, and community. Developed by Arnold Mindell, Ph.D. (author of Sitting in the Fire, Dreambody, etc.) and his colleagues from around the world, Process Work and Worldwork are based on a trust that even the most disturbing experiences – including physical illness, conflicts and world issues – can lead us in the direction of change, growth, and connection.

LANE ARYE, Ph.D. is an internationally known Process Worker and Worldworker. In the Balkans, he co-led a UN-funded project working with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims on ethnic tension, war-related trauma, and community building. Lane has also worked with conflicts between high-caste and low-caste Hindus from India, anti-Semitism in Germany and Poland, as well as racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, and class issues in the US and Europe. Author of Unintentional Music: Releasing Your Deepest Creativity, Lane lives with his wife, Lecia, and has a private practice in Berkeley and San Rafael.

http://www.ProcessWorkLane.com/

Worldwork Open Forum in Berkeley, 7:00 PM 4/28/04

In case you've been wondering just what it is I've been doing that has kept me away from the Oaks' Wednsday night tournaments, here is your chance to find out:

Experience Worldwork!

Open Community Forum, 7:00 PM 4/28/04

Explore issues of importance to you in a facilitated setting.

Examples might include: the war in Iraq; parking in your neighborhood; racism; organic food in the Berkeley Unified School District; etc.

The facilitator, Lane Arye, Ph.D., has worked on community building in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and in Oakland.

Wednesday, April 28, 2004, 7:00-10:00 PM

1452 Cornell Avenue. Berkeley (Please park in church lot across street)

For more information, contact Gabriel Todd (510) 428-9958 or Lane (510) 558-8805

Recommended contribution: $5. No on turned away. Everyone is welcome.

A Bright Room Called Day

Debbie and I went to the theater in San Francisco last Friday night, seeing a production by the La Luna Theater Collective of Tony Kushner's play A Bright Room Called Day.

The play is being performed Friday and Saturday nights through November 8, with an additional performance on Monday, October 27, at the EXIT on Taylor (one of three venues of the EXIT Theater), 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets cost $20; call 415-721-9682 for reservations.

We had read the play some years back in a book- and play-reading group to which we belong, but the details had faded from our memories, and we came to it essentially fresh.

The play concerns the reactions of a small group of artists and intellectuals, connected to each other largely through the German filmmaking industry, to the advent of Hitler and the Nazis, in 1933. By interleaving the short scenes with a "present-day" (1990) pair of characters, Kushner draws parallels between the plight of the characters of the past and our own lives today. These parallels are more apt in America under the rule of the Shrub than they ever were when his father was president.

The production was well-cast, with the performers inhabiting and delivering their roles excellently. My largest criticism is about the writing and structure of the play itself: the many brief scenes seemed fragmented to me, with the fragmentation getting in the way of what ought to be a long, slow, steady buildup of the drama and tension.

Marking the scene breaks are captions, presented by slide projector, giving the date and outlining events of the day. A slide saying something like "February 20, 1933 - Later that night" resonates unfortunately with the film Start the Revolution Without Me with the constant narrated repetition of the date: "Still 1789...."

Kushner is wordy and long-winded – the production is more than two hours long – but his writing is nonetheless powerful and authentic.

One speech particularly moved me, spoken by Husz, an exiled Hungarian cinematographer:

Shut up. Listen.
There is something calling, Paulinka.
If you still retain a shred of decency
you can hear it – it's a dim terrible
voice that's calling – a bass howl, like
a cow in a slaughterhouse, but
far, far off...
It is calling us to action, calling us
to stand against the calamity,
to spare nothing, not our blood,
nor our happiness, nor our lives
in the struggle to stop the dreadful day
that's burning now
in oil flames on the horizon.

What makes the voice pathetic
is that it doesn't know
what kind of people it's reaching.
Us.
No one hears it, except us.
This Age wanted heroes.
It got us instead:
carefully constructed, but
immobile.
Subtle, but
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.
It happens.
A whole generation of washouts.
History says stand up,
and we totter and collapse,
weeping, moved, but not
sufficient.

The best of us, lacking.
The most decent,
not decent enough.
The kindest,
too cruel,
the most loving
too full of hate,
the wisest,
too stupid,
the fittest
unfit
to take up
the burden of the times.

The Enemy
has a voice like seven thunders.
What chance did that dim voice ever have?
Marvel that anyone heard it
instead of wondering why nobody did anything,
marvel that we heard it,
we who have no right to hear it–
NO RIGHT!
And it would be a mercy not to.
But mercy ... is a thing ... no one remembers its face anymore.

The best would be
that time would stop
right now,
in this middling moment of awfulness,
before the very worst arrives.
We'd all be spared more than telling.
That would be best.

Proof that Playing Too Much Minesweeper Is Not Good for You

Minesweeper Faith

When playing Minesweeper, I can click on a square and know that it is clear. How? By logical deduction.

But that logical deduction depends on assumptions. First of all, I assume that the programming of the game is sound and that the numbers on the screen are an accurate and honest count of the number ofmines in adjoining squares. Secondly, my knowledge depends that the logical reasoning that goes into my conclusion is in fact sound. To play effectively, I must believe that what I conclude from my logical reasoning is coincides with the actual placement of the mines in the grid.

I can play Minesweeper. I can make deductions about the placement of the mines, make decisions accordingly, and avoid clicking on mines. It works over and over again.

To play Minesweeper requires faith. My faith is borne out again and again. The confirmation of the faith is simple and quick.

Poker Faith

The mathematics of permutations and combinations and the principles of probability that underly the game of poker are extensions of logic and deduction from the same foundations of mathematics that underly the game of Minesweeper. I must believe in the soundness of the reasoning that goes into them, and I must believe in the honesty of the game, if I am to play poker with any sense of it as a genuinely winnable game — "winning" here meaning more or less that in the long run I'll win more money at it.

A big difference between poker and Minesweeper is that with the latter game, my faith in mathematical reasoning is immediately confirmed. The stochastic nature of poker, on the other hand, means that I can play a hand "correctly" (i.e. in such a way as to maximize my expected win) and lose — or for that matter play very far from correctly and win. The mathematical reasoning that tells me that this cell is definitely free and that one definitely contains a hidden mine is far less definite for poker, saying only that if I play a particular hand in particular circumstances many times over, on average I should expect my average win or loss to be close to a particular value.

To play poker requires faith; but that faith must bear up to the challenges of short-term results. Faith takes a substantial beating at the poker table. ... but the mathematical reasoning in which I place my faith tells me that to lose faith is to lose.

Once last year, while playing in side games at the World Series of Poker, in Las Vegas, I took a substantial loss at a $20-$40 high-low split seven-card stud game. I kept having to throw away hand after hand that started well but caught bad cards on fourth street, or got punished when I caught that fourth good card but caught worthless bricks on the last three cards. Again and again I committed my money to a pot only to see it vanish into hopelessness. I busted out of the game and returned to my hotel room in a terrible state. I raged at my losses, pummelling my bed with a pillow, screaming with frustration with each blow. How could this have happened to me? I was playing as well as I knew how, and I had lost, badly. The law of averages was on my side; what had gone wrong?

And then I wondered, just how unlucky had I been? I took out pencil and paper and began to calculate roughly how often I should get a decent starting hand, and how often that hand will catch good or bad on fourth street. The numbers I worked out showed that I ought to be catching bad a majority of the time, and that in fact my luck had been bad, but not outrageously so.

I had undergone a crisis of faith, and through something analogous to meditation and prayer found the balance I needed to stay the course.

Faith and Science

Even the most zealous adherent to logical positivism must eventually rely on her faith in positivism to accept and believe in a number of invisible and undetectable things. That is what is so troubling about quantum mechanics, for example: reason and careful scientific observation lead to conclusions about the nature of the world and the fundamental entities that make it up that run deeply contrary to common sense and daily experience. The practice of empirical science demands a great deal of belief in invisible things, phenomena not apparent to the senses except through elaborate constructions of instruments, and so on. Such belief is rewarded by confirmation, by consistency of results, and so on. Quantum-dependent devices such as semiconductors work. So do vaccines and epoxy glue.

An ordinary human being cannot work things out from first principles all the time. She has to trust her memories, trust consensus faith in consensus constructions, and so on. "I have studied this carefully and determined it for myself" devolves into "The person who asserts this has good credentials, and there are people out there who might have checked this out, and until someone says otherwise it's a good bet that this is true." One cannot accept the validity of science without making many leaps of faith. Above all, one must have faith in the consensus of the community of science.

And then there is Gödel's theorem. In its strictest form it states that in a self-consistent theory of numbers there must exist propositions that, while true, are not provable within that system; any number theory in which all true statements are provable will be inconsistent, and so all false statements are provable in it as well.

The larger implication of Gödel's theorem is that this situation of unprovable truths is the case in ANY logical system. (Handwaving proof: an isomorphism exists between said logical system and a number theory. Gödel's theorem can be proven in that number theory, and so the isomorphic proof stands in the logical system under consideration.) So there exist truths that cannot be proven under a given logical system. In particular, there exist truths that cannot be proven within the logical system that comprises science, rational empiricism, and logical positivism.

In other words, it is scientifically inevitable that there are truths that exist outside of science. If they can be reached at all, they can only be reached by faith.

Does my brain and my sensory apparatus constitute a logical system? If so, then there are truths than I cannot perceive or deduce from my perceptions. What if I include the things that I can make and use in this logical system? Then there are truths that cannot register on my instruments any more than I can perceive them directly. This strongly suggests (although it does not in fact prove) that there exists truths that I cannot perceive or comprehend. The faith I place in logic, therefore, tells me of the likelihood of the transcendental, the ineffable, beyond the reach of reason, philosophy, or even emotion.

The Paradoxical Business of Spiritual Growth

Scott Marley is troubled by what he describes as the whole messy paradoxical business of spiritual growth:

Is it wise to cut ourselves off more from the world and seek enlightenment on our own? How can it be, when the whole point is that all humanity is in reality one great indivisible being, and the divisions and separations and distinctions between one person and another are only illusions? Isn't there something self-contradictory about the idea of pursuing enlightenment in isolation from other people?

And yet of course the world is a very noisy place with a great many distractions and not well suited for the pursuit of enlightenment, a lot of which has to do with quieting your mind and your desires enough that you can begin to perceive what is divine inside yourself.

Does the person of spirit withdraw from the world, or engage with it? This is one of the big questions.

I have been either blessed or burdened with a world-class education in materialism and rationalism, and this posed a substantial obstacle to my own spiritual development. I come down pretty solidly on the side of engagement of the world, perhaps because of my materialist bias. And it is through engagement with the world that have come the experiences that have been the seeds of my own spiritual growth.

I have occasionally tested the waters of various religions. When I looked at Buddhism, I found myself dissatisfied with something that seemed to me essential to Buddhist metaphysics: a sense that enlightenment consists of turning inward, away from the world. My own spirituality is inspired by the world and the wonders in it; to turn away from this feels to me like betraying something important.

At the same time, modern everyday civilized experience seems itself to function as insulation between oneself and the actual world. The experience of my computer monitor and keyboard; or of radio and television; cars, buses, and trains; living rooms and bedrooms; and the artificialities of modern life are a far cry from the wind, the rain, ocean surf, the dirt beneath my feet, green, growing things, and the starry night sky. To find the real real world involves a certain kind of turning away from immediate distractions.

I can't accept that the wind, sea, or stars are Maya — illusion that distracts from matters of importance — but CNN, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Electrolite are. And at the same time, they, too, are aspects of reality, important in their own ways.

In the end, I think there are times to turn away from society and focus on the real world, and there there are times to turn away from the world and look within oneself. But there are also times to reengage with the world, and with society, and with the Blogoverse and television and the newspapers. One needs the quiet and stillness to find that inner spark of divinity, but having found it perhaps one should kindle and feed it so that it burns brighter and stronger, and share its warmth and light with others, perhaps even to help them kindle their own. The traffic along Hollis Street during morning rush hour carries the same divine essence ("Buddha-nature" perhaps) as a sunrise or a perfect rose.

And yet (always "and yet"!), Scott continues, the pursuit of enlightenment itself is only vanity. What arrogance to think that our individual efforts matter! Humanity as a great galumphing whole will take its own sweet time getting to enlightenment at whatever laggardly pace suits it, and there's not a whole lot any of us can do to speed up the process. ...

To respond, I can only quote Rabbi Tarfon: "You are not required to complete the task, yet you are not free to withdraw from it." (Pirkei Avot 2:21) (I am in no way a Talmudic scholar; but I'm pretty good with Google.) Rabbi Tarfon spoke of study of the Torah, but his words are also frequently applied to tikkun olam, the healing of the world.

This is a huge task, far beyond any one person. The best anybody can do to improve some of the parts of the world that are closest to them.

In the Buddhist viewpoint, also, "completing" the task in one lifetime is irrelevant. All one needs to do is leave the path of life just a little bit cleaner than one found it, and over many lifetimes the improvements add up.

Yahrzeit

Two years ago today my mother, Sheila Livingstion Bostick, died. My partner Debbie and I were with her when she passed, in her room in the Hospice of the Central Coast, in Monterey, California, in the early morning hours.

After we slept, we checked our email and learned that our friend Jenna Felice had died only a few short hours before, although a continent away.

Two candles are burning right now on the table in our living room, in front of the window that faces the street.